After The Sucker Punch
Lorraine Devon Wilke
Author Bio
Writer, photographer, singer/songwriter, and Huffington Post contributor, Lorraine Devon Wilke, started early as a creative hyphenate. First there was music and theater, next came rock & roll, then a leap into film when a feature she co-wrote (To Cross the Rubicon) was produced by a Seattle film company, opening doors in a variety of creative directions.
In the years following, she wrote for and performed on theater stages, developed her photography skills, and accrued a library of well-received feature screenplays; most recently, The Theory of Almost Everything was a top finalist in the 2012 Final Draft Big Break Screenwriting Contest. She kept her hand in music throughout – songwriting, recording, performing – leading to the fruition of the longtime goal of recording an original album (Somewhere On the Way). Accomplished in collaboration with songwriting/producing partner, Rick M. Hirsch, the album garnered stellar reviews and can be found at CDBaby and iTunes. She continues with music whenever she can (which, she maintains, is never, ever, enough!).
Devon Wilke’s current life is split between Playa del Rey and Ferndale, California, and is shared with her husband, Pete Wilke, an entertainment and securities attorney, her son, engineer and web designer, Dillon Wilke, and stepdaughter, educational administrator Jennie Wilke Willens and family. She curates and manages both her fine art photography and personal blog (Rock+Paper+Music), contributes regularly at The Huffington Post and writes a column for the award-winning newspaper, The Ferndale Enterprise. She has another novel in the works, as well as a non-fiction piece on brain injury, and invites you to enjoy her essays and journalistic pieces @ Contently.com. You can follow her journey with this book at AfterTheSuckerPunch.com and be sure to check her website for links and information.
Description
They buried her father at noon, at five she found his journals, and in the time it took to read one-and-a-half pages her world turned upside down… he thought she was a failure.
Every child, no matter what age, wants to know their father loves them, and Tessa Curzio – thirty-six, emerging writer, ex-rocker, lapsed Catholic, defected Scientologist, and fourth in a family of eight complicated people – is no exception. But just when she thought her twitchy life was finally coming together – solid relationship, creative job; a view of the ocean – the one-two punch of her father’s death and posthumous indictment proves an existential knockout.
She tries to “just let it go,” as her sister suggests, but life viewed through the filter of his damning words is suddenly skewed, shaking the foundation of everything from her solid relationship and winning job to the truth of her family, even her sense of self. From there, friendships strain, bad behavior ensues, new men entreat, and family drama spikes, all leading to her little-known aunt, a nun and counselor, who lovingly strong-arms Tessa onto a journey of discovery and reinvention. It’s a trip that’s not always pretty – or particularly wise – but somewhere in all the twists and turns unexpected truths are found.
Author and longtime Huffington Post contributor, Lorraine Devon Wilke, takes an irreverent look at father/daughter relationships through the unique prism of Tessa’s saga and its exploration of family, faith, cults, creativity, new love and old, and the struggle to define oneself against the inexplicable perceptions of a deceased parent. Told with both sass and sensibility, it’s a story wrapped in contemporary culture but with a very classic heart.
Cover design by Grace Amandes @ www.gracemandes.com
Cover photographs by Lorraine Devon Wilke
www.lorrainedevonwilke.com
Book excerpt
Chapter 1
January 5, 2002 – the journal of Leo Curzio:
“One is obligated by moral duty to love one’s child. One is not obligated to like them. A conundrum when it comes to my fourth, my third daughter, Teresa – or Tessa, as she insists we call her now.
“Recently I searched through my journals of the past several years looking for an entry about her but could find nothing. Perhaps that’s not so strange; she has been an enigma to me since she finished high school. As I look back, it seems her senior year was the pinnacle of her life…from that point on little has happened to bear out her great promise.
“Convinced of her own abilities, which do seem apparent or, at the very least, measurable, she decided to try for a job in the movies, TV, or perhaps the recording business out in Hollywood. She insisted that if after two years she had gotten nowhere she would try something else. Well, it’s been more than three years and she has nothing to show for it except some amateur acting classes and self-produced plays. In September she will be twenty-five.
“So what’s the problem with Teresa? For sure, I don’t know. She is a great disappointment. Not simply because she’s failed up to now, but that endowed with so much talent she hasn’t employed it for anything useful and doesn’t show signs of improving.”
On a day when all she wanted to do was mourn the father so often longed for and buried just hours before, Tessa Curzio sat on the bed in which she was surely conceived and felt posthumously sucker punched. She looked down at the twelve-year-old journal splayed across her lap and realized it truly was a Pandora’s box come to life, a dubious gift from a dead man who had little to say while living but clearly plenty upon departure. She snapped it shut and threw it across the room with enough force to shatter her mother’s purple vanity lamp.
A clock that followed to the floor doggedly kept ticking time. 5:17 pm.
It was the beginning of the next uncomfortable phase of her life.
Chapter 2
Because no tantrum could go unnoticed in this house, the door flew open and oldest sister Michaela, tight chignon and Ann Taylor classics all in place, swept in with a frown and a large tray of hors d’oeuvres. She and Tessa, though only four years apart, were opposite in so many critical ways they struggled to be even marginal friends, a status they’d admirably put aside to “rise above” during this challenging week. Noting the purple shards on the Oriental she’d vacuumed earlier that morning, Michaela stifled a retort only when she caught the look on Tessa’s face.
“Oh, honey, I know, I know,” she whispered, miscalculating the motive behind the lamp’s demise. She left her tray on the dresser and came to Tessa with sympathetic arms. “It’s so hard to lose him…I know.”
(to be cont….)
Author Website
http://www.lorrainedevonwilke.com